Category Archives: Life

I have been terribly neglectful, shamefully neglectful, of this blog. I have no excuses. Simply put, it has been the last thing on my mind, and I will endeavor to bring it to the forefront once more. Lately, my writing life was centered around the novel that I’m working on. It is a young adult novel that has its fits and starts. Sometimes, the writing is so smooth and automatic that words tumble from me thousands at a time. Once, I simply sat down to edit one inconsistent paragraph, yet somehow found myself finishing the chapter, and half the of the next chapter besides. Sometimes, a simple scene meant to be one third of a chapter has blossomed into an entire chapter of its own.

I’m not complaining; the writing is brilliant when it works like that. However, each of these chapters seems to be a child that I find under my care. Sometimes, the children are wonderfully cooperative. Sometimes, they rebel like teenagers. Sometimes, they start as one, and end as the other. There really is no rhyme or reason.

This book obsesses me with my need to complete it. It is set in a world of my own creation. The main character is a strong female lead; the kind of person I wanted to read about as a girl growing up. I wanted the “damsel” not to be the one in distress, but the one in control. I wanted to read about someone kicking butt and taking names, and not needing a strong male to help her when she broke a nail. Xena opened my eyes to strong female role models, and I wanted more like that. That’s why writing this world is so important to me. It’s not that each woman is an Amazon and all the men are weaklings. It’s simply a world where women and men can be equally as weak and strong as the next person. Strength, intelligence, and ambition are not determined my gender.

It’s amazing how often I’ve had the conversation with people regarding money of monthly versus yearly. The fact is, we see a big number and we get intimidated, but a small number is okay. It’s actually amazing how few people stop about how it all adds up in the end. I mean, picture that you have a coffee habit of $5 a day, and you might think that’s not all that bad. However, if I tell you to do the math and you realize that this amounts to $1,825 a year, it suddenly dawns on you. For that couple of cups a coffee you buy a day, saved up, you could go on a cruise.

The basis of writing the most endearing characters is to draw the audience into that character in a sense of shared universal experience. I find myself very conscious of this when I’m watching something or reading something. Still, I sometimes am surprised at the depth of feeling a medium will have for me. On such occasions, I like to try and dig into my childhood (and perhaps my present) to find where the root of the empathy lies.

A walk through my neighbour is a walk through converging paradigms. It’s a neighbourhood that started during the end of WWII, and continued being built into the 1960s. The architectural styles change, from house to house, telling the stories of the owners and different times just in detail alone. However, that’s not the only conflicting story to be told.

I’m not trying to sound old or wise, nor cliché or trite, when I say that my town has changed. The whole world has “moved on” since I was my sons’ age. I’m not simply talking of technology, either. With a memory as clear as mine for how far back it goes, It amazes me some of the things I used to be able to do as a child that I can never imagine my son will share.